Prospero's Half-Life (34 page)

“
They were pretty prolific,” Troy was saying. “I mean, by the
time you listen to one of these songs Bob Pollard would have
written three others. He just couldn’t stop, it was like he had to,
you know?”

“
Yeah, sure,” Richard replied vaguely. He had only the most
basic idea of what Troy was saying. It was Samantha’s
tablet.
No
, he
berated himself,
it’s not Samantha’s
tablet. It’s the same model as Samantha’s tablet. The odds of it
being Samantha’s, well...

“
You like the tablets?” Troy asked. “I got a bunch of them at
the last stop I made. Buncha scavengers in Brantford, at the ruins
of that cult”. Richard felt his heart stop, and he looked at Troy
with a look that must have been quite strange, since Troy gave him
an odd look in response.

“
You alright?” he asked, concerned. Richard nodded shakily,
trying to blink his way through his racing thoughts.

“
These scavengers...I mean, what could they have found at the
ruins? They must have been pretty picked over, right?”

Troy grinned.
“Well, that’s the thing. You’re right, of course. McAllister ran
the place over pretty thoroughly during the wars, and the scavs
have picked over anything that McAllister’s men left behind. These
guys, though, they claim that they found a secret passage in the
basement – by accident, as it turned out. They were resting in the
basement because there was some pack of wild dogs or something
after them. One of ‘em was trying to catch their breath and put
their hands on one of the walls and realized that it wasn’t a wall
at all. They found a little passageway through there that led to
what must have been, like, a fallout shelter or something at one
point, at least from the way they tell it. Biggest room in there
was weird, painted all white, and if you closed the door it was
white too, so the room would have been pretty wild if you were
locked in there”. Richard shuddered but said nothing. “There were
other rooms in there, too, although they were hidden behind false
walls. One of ‘em had a bunch of knapsacks and such in it, lookin’
like they were taken from refugees after the plague. People say
that cult that McAllister took out used to kidnap people and eat
them, so I guess it wasn’t a huge surprise that they kept all their
stuff hidden somewhere”.

Richard’s head
was swimming and he felt the sudden urgent need to sit down. He
shot his arm out and caught a stiff lean on the table. Troy took a
step back.

“
You ok, man?” he asked, worried. “You’re not, like, catching
or nothing, are you?” Richard laughed weakly.

“
No, nothing like that,” he wheezed. “That, uh, cult, they
never ate people. Nothing like that”.

Troy peered at
him sharply. “What makes you say that?” he asked.

“
I was part of it for a while,” Richard replied simply. “Right
before they got crushed by the Republic. That’s actually when I got
taken into slavery”.

“
Oh, wow,” Troy replied, suddenly very interested. “So, like,
you saw the whole thing go down. So, were you there when the bridge
blew up too early and trapped everyone on the wrong side of the
river?”

Richard
laughed harder, shaking his head and trying to conceal the tears
running down his face.

“
No, that was on purpose,” he said between bouts of laughter.
“I blew that bridge early so the normal people – the ones the cult
had kidnapped or brainwashed or what have you – so they could get
away. Make a clean break. Before the Republic got them”.

Troy gaped at
him, surprised beyond all words. “You don’t say...” he said,
amazed. “Well, they sure got away, all right”. Richard stopped
laughing and cocked his head to the side.

“
Did they?” he asked. “I never found out what happened to them
after that night”.

“
That’s not surprising,” Troy said, “the Republic doesn’t
really like to talk about its defeats. Those boys in Niagara like
to talk all about it, though. The Republic sent men to follow your
people all the way along the lakes, picking off the stragglers, but
when they tried to cross over into Niagara they found out they
weren’t the only army in the area”.

Richard
couldn’t help but smile. “The Niagara Confederation stopped them?”
Troy nodded.

“
Stopped them and told them that if they kept going they would
be decimated and turned back to bring word to London that such
invasions wouldn’t be tolerated. Come to think of it, I think they
mark it as a feast holiday down there. I haven’t been out that way
in a couple of years, but I seem to recall that”.

Richard
laughed. He felt a strange, vibrant form of relief grow inside of
him. “I guess it worked out after all,” he said, his voice shaking
slightly.

“
I guess so,” Troy replied. He gestured at the tablet. “So you
might have known someone that this stuff belonged to. I only took
the electronics from the scavs – nothing else I would bother
carrying, only other stuff they had was a bunch of flashlights and
shit. I’ve got enough flashlights to turn midnight into noon, so I
just took the laptops and tablets and called it a
trade”.

Richard picked
up the tablet with a sense of reverent awe. It might be Samantha’s
after all. There was only one real way to find out. He pressed the
power button but the tablet remained dead to the world. He felt
disappointment rise up his gorge, hot and unlovely.

“
Oh, hey man,” Troy said, “batteries on that thing won’t have
any juice in them. I’ve got the charger with it, though, and you
can charge it on the bicycle if you want”.

Richard leapt
at the opportunity. Troy hooked the charger up to the power outputs
on the bike and checked all of the connections to make sure they
were snug. Richard climbed on and began to pedal, slowly at first
and then with a steadily increasing sense of urgency. At first
there was no response from the tablet and he felt an old sadness,
but then the screen lit up and the symbol that indicated that it
was charging became apparent on the screen. His heart leapt into
his throat and he began to pedal harder, trying to get the battery
juiced up as quickly as possible. Even with hard pedalling,
however, charging the battery to full capacity took a half-hour of
sweat-inducing labour. When Richard got off of the bike he was
breathing heavily, and his limbs felt shaky and rubbery.

Troy clapped
him on the back. “Alright,” he said, “power it on and let’s see
what we’ve got”. Richard did so, his finger shaking as he pressed
down the tiny power button. The screen flared into life and booted
to a simple screen that told the time and date, and showed a simple
slide-to-unlock mechanism. With something like religious awe he
took his finger tip and slid the lock over to the unlock position.
The screen changed and it turned into the home-screen that had once
been so familiar but now seemed completely alien.

“
Hey, it works!” Troy exclaimed. Richard nodded and began
poring through the artifacts that were presented on the screen. He
saw the icon for the browser, but that would of course be useless;
if anyone had a wifi signal up and running he had never seen nor
heard of it. Besides that, even if he did have a wifi signal to
connect to, the only place the internet existed was in Troy
Larkson’s tent. It belonged to the past, a relic to be wondered
over and to perhaps be consulted as though it were an Oracle from
out of time. He found an icon marked “Pictures” and this was of
much greater interest to him. He felt a twinge of panic about
opening it but shoved it deeply down inside of him. He had to
know.

There were a large number of pictures on the tablet, divided
into an assortment of categories.
Cuba
2009
one read.
Second Year
went another. Richard
selected
Second Year
, his heart seeming to beat only intermittently. The category
resolved into a series of thumbnails of pictures and he selected
one at random. It was a picture of a cheap apartment, with posters
on the wall and inexpensive, shoddy wooden furniture everywhere. A
trio of young women were posing for the camera, caught halfway
between alluring sexuality and disarming hilarity. The middle one
was unmistakably Samantha. She was slightly younger in the picture
than the Samantha that he had last known, but she was still largely
the same: the same curvy Dutch face, the same mass of blonde hair
that he had once run his eager fingers through, the same steady,
slightly knowing blue-eyed expression. He clutched the tablet and
felt his knees buckle, and within a moment he had collapsed on the
ground. Troy stood over him, trying to rouse him with increasing
franticness, but for a time Richard was completely lost to the
physical world, trapped as he was in a mirror-house of his own
memories.

THREE

Richard made
his way back to the farmhouse in a daze, the tablet clutched to his
chest like a child’s teddy bear. His feet stumbled and stuttered
over the rough cracks and season-teased rises in the pavement but
he did not notice it very often. He was running that tape-loop of
memory in his head, replaying his life from his last day as a
working sales manager to the day that he had woken up to find that
Samantha had left him. The words that she had written in her last
letter to him had subsided to bare scratches but now flared into
new, hideous relief; he remembered being called nine types of
coward and felt the coppery tang of disappointment fill his mouth
once again.

He had not
attempted to look at the tablet since he left Troy’s tent of
wonders. He had powered it down and it was now silent and dark. He
was loathe to turn it on at all, since he had no idea how he would
charge the batteries again, but he knew that he was going to have
to do it again at some point. His curiosity, his own treacherous
heart, would force him into it. Even if it was as small a matter as
turning it on and looking at a picture of her for the briefest of
moments, he knew that it was only a matter of time.

He broke out
of his daze and found that he had walked nearly the entire distance
in a trance, enraptured by the snippet of the past that he had
uncovered. He saw the farmhouse rising in the late afternoon haze,
only twenty minutes or so down the road. A coldness struck him with
sharp force; Karl would never let him keep the tablet. Such an
artefact would be something that Karl would insist that he keep for
himself, and Richard would be without his window into the past as
quickly as he had gained it.

As he grew
closer to the farmhouse the wilderness that bordered the road
turned to carefully cropped land; Karl, like all other landowners,
insisted that the wild growth be brought under heel on their land,
in order to denote it as owned land. As soon as the border of
Karl’s land was crossed, Richard got off of the road and began to
cross the rough but short grass. He headed towards a small copse of
four trees that was about halfway between the farmhouse and the
wilderness. He had undertaken a lot of the clearing in this
particular section of his master’s property and he’d discovered
what he’d thought of as a mildly interesting feature of one of the
trees. One of them had a large, cavern-like hollow in the base of
it, the sort of thing one would expect an animal to live under in a
children’s story. Now its existence came back to him, and before he
knew it he had stashed the tablet snugly within the hollow. He
looked up at the sky, concerned. The clouds above were white and
blameless enough, he thought; if there was rain, though, all he
could do was hope that the hollow under the tree would keep the
worst of the moisture out. With a last, wary glance at the small
grove, he made a direct path towards the arena with as much speed
as his tired legs could muster.

After oiling
the hinges and testing the gates, Richard ran a critical eye over
the arena and decided that it was as ready as he would ever be able
to make it. He headed back to the farmhouse to inform Karl that
preparations for the night’s festivities were complete. When he
mounted the creaking stairs and entered the small, dusty office, he
saw that Karl was not alone. A tall, whipcord-thin man with
glittering black eyes and a sardonic grin sat in the visitor’s
chair, his arms crossed. He and Karl were engaged in an animated,
somewhat ribald conversation; Richard waited with a patient smile
on his lips until there was a lull and Karl spoke to him.

“
Everything is ready, then?” Karl asked shortly. Richard
nodded.

“
The House Speaker will find no more exquisite entertainment
outside of London itself, sir,” Richard replied with a small,
self-satisfied smile. Karl laughed at this, and the stranger seemed
to find it fairly amusing as well. Karl gestured carelessly at the
stranger.

“
This is the Speaker’s scout, a Mr. Anthony Mendoza. He’s come
to alert us that His Honour is only an hours ride or so from our
humble abode. Rouse the other servants and get them into position.
Get that preening cat Sandra to finish the dinner preparations and
to prepare drinks, and then make sure old Tyler is sober”. Karl
grinned at Mr. Anthony Mendoza. “Tyler can do his job sodden or
sober, but I would prefer not to offend His Honour with the smell
of farm-fermented booze”. He shot a serious look at Richard. “If
he
is
drunk, have
him whipped. Marcus and John can do it. Those lazy bastards are
getting fat off of my dime, anyway”.

Richard
nodded, already vowing to whip Tyler himself if the man was drunk
at this moment. He’d warned the stable-keeper on any number of
occasions that he would either have to curb his drinking or develop
a higher tolerance to blinding pain. Marcus and John he would leave
alone; they were a pair of vicious, half-bright mongrels that would
be more likely to kill Tyler than to punish him. None of his
thoughts passed through his expression, which remained an engaged,
pleasant smile. Karl nodded brusquely and waved him onwards.
Richard ducked out of the office with a slight nod of his head.
Once he was away from his master he allowed himself to grit his
teeth and begin to track down the other servants.